Bursting Pride in Super Bowl Team Replenishes a City

Friday

In a city that has been associated over the last four and a half years with divisiveness and suffering, the delirium over the Saints is pretty much unanimous.

NEW ORLEANS — The threshold for excessive celebration here is high.

Aside from the usual occasions — Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, Halloween, days that end in ‘y’ — there are Sundays in the fall, every one of them a festival, when faces are painted black and gold, fans are dressed as robots, clowns and Elvises, and the Superdome parking lot smells of boiled crawfish. And if the Saints actually win, people really start to have a good time.

And yet nothing in the past — not even the return of the Saints to the Superdome in 2006, transforming it from the venue of misery it had been after Hurricane Katrina, nor the stellar season that followed — quite measures up to what has gone on here for the last five days.

“As crazy as we are this year?” considered Jerry Romig, the Saints’ announcer for all but two of their 43 seasons. “No.”

The Saints’ win on Sunday night, a victory that sends them to the Super Bowl for the first time, unleashed a raucous, trombone-blaring, grown-man-weeping, stranger-hugging frenzy. In a city that has been associated over the last four and a half years with divisiveness and suffering, the delirium over the Saints is pretty much unanimous.

Consider: Sunday night’s game prompted the rescheduling of both a performance of Verdi’s “Requiem” by the New Orleans Opera Association, and a performance of Keith Lewis and his Blues Revue at the Young at Heart Lounge.

A number of schools have canceled classes for Feb. 8, the day after the Super Bowl. A civil trial has been postponed. Mardi Gras parades have been moved. Commander’s Palace, the 130-year-old grand dame of New Orleans restaurants, will close on game night, the first time the restaurant has closed for a one-time event in memory, possibly ever.

Serious people are discussing how much the Super Bowl will affect the turnout in this year’s mayoral election, as the primary takes place on Saturday, Feb. 6, the day before the game.

“It’s more of a problem for candidates who have to build support,” explained Silas Lee, a pollster and political analyst, arguing that the distraction benefits the current front-runner, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu. “It’s harder to crack that emotional barrier right now.”

Just how much of an effect is debatable, but it is generally agreed that there will be one. In other words, Garrett Hartley’s straight and true field goal from 40 yards on Sunday could have a direct bearing on who governs New Orleans for the next four years. Few seem to think this is odd.

The Saints’ trip to the Super Bowl is more than a respite for a city still trying to recover, though that of course is part of it. Saints fans have known more than four decades of irritation, a demoralizing span that parallels the city’s struggles since its population peak in the 1960 census. Along that timeline lies white flight, an oil bust, a soaring crime rate, a steady frog-march of corrupt officials, near absolute devastation and a frustratingly slow and fitful recovery.

Throughout that run of bad luck and trouble there have been the Saints, usually on the wrong end of the score. Winning has become such a foreign concept that the city hasn’t been entirely sure what to do with it.

There was a moment, in mid-December, when it looked as if the Saints could be heading into the playoffs undefeated, when 13-0 was shoe-polished onto rear windows and chalked on signs outside bars and restaurants (and barbershops and grocery stores) from Lakeview to the Lower Ninth Ward. But even before the Saints lost to the Cowboys last month — and lost the game after that and the game after that — barroom analysts were already becoming uneasy, discussing the merits of a setback. A loss would just relax everybody, one older gentleman quietly suggested at a Christmas party in the Tremé neighborhood.

Perfection, anyway, just doesn’t sit well in New Orleans, a city whose music and food owe much to improvisation and whose approach to most things in life has historically been rather laissez-faire. Perfection, said Stephen Hales, a pediatrician and a member of the Rex Organization, an elite Mardi Gras krewe, is something Dallas or Atlanta would get worked up about.

That is more than just a little dig at intraconference foes.

New Orleanians are acutely aware of how their city is perceived. They’ve had to explain to friends after their post-Katrina sojourns in Dallas or Atlanta or Houston — those well-groomed, go-get-’em cities that have flourished in the past few decades — why they wanted to return to a city long associated with crime and corruption. If you have to ask, you’ll never know, according to Louis Armstrong, and most outsiders don’t, and it gets frustrating. A football team can’t change that, but it can help.

“We have something that we can say, ‘Hey that’s our team,’ ” Mr. Romig said. “We’re not all losers, we’ve got a winner, we’ve got a program here that we’re proud of.”

It’s a common refrain here, that Sunday night’s victory only showed the world what New Orleans already knew. And a Super Bowl victory on top of that, of course, would be a mighty nice lagniappe.

“This is possibly the biggest thing we’ve ever had,” said Ella Brennan, the 84-year-old matriarch of New Orleans restaurateurs. “Just getting there is making us happy. Lord help us if we win.”

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